Polanyi-Hayek Workshop

A thread left hanging from my previous post on F.A. Hayek entitled ‘What the heck’s going on with Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom?’ was the focus on international order, which entails Hayek’s assessment of the scalar problems of planning and his advocating the absorption of separate states in a federal organisation. The focus of Chapter 15 on international order in The Road to Serfdom is wide-ranging, addressing aspects of planning and including what Hayek refers to as ‘super-state’ or ‘super-national’ authority within an international system of states. Interesting positions are therefore reflected in this analysis on world-state formation that have been neglected within international theory. What does Hayek have to say that may interest approaches to the political economy and historical sociology of state formation and thinking on ‘the international’ today?

As a short squib on the forthcoming workshop ‘Questioning the Utopian Springs of Market Economy’ (15-16 August 2014), to be held at the University of Sydney on Karl Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek, I want to highlight the introduction of an ‘early bird’ registration process. Registrations are now open for the workshop: HERE. At that link you will find further details on the workshop theme; conference registration; the draft programme; dinner arrangements; and a section ‘around the workshop’ covering accommodation, visa information for international travellers to Australia, local travel, and child care facilities.

On For the Desk Drawer this week it is great to be able to provide further details on the forthcoming workshop to be held at the University of Sydney on Karl Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek. The workshop is entitled ‘Questioning the Utopian Springs of Market Economy’ and will take place across 15 and 16 August 2014. It is part of a series of new developments this year linked to the Department of Political Economy — part of the School of Social and Political Sciences within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences — not least the fact that the Department of Political Economy will be very soon starting an appointment process for a permanent Lectureship position in Political Economy. There will be more news on that shortly. For the present, though, here are those details on the Polanyi-Hayek workshop.

This year marks the 70th anniversary of Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and will no doubt generate much congratulatory back slapping and warmth from the cognoscenti of the right-wing establishment. Elsewhere, at a forthcoming workshop on the utopian springs of market economy, to be held at the University of Sydney, there is a revisiting of both Hayek and his contemporary Karl Polanyi, whose classic The Great Transformation was also published in 1944. With the binaries of planning versus market competition, or fascism and socialism versus capitalism, the figure of Hayek and the text of The Road to Serfdom have both become lodestars for defending freedom based on nineteenth-century liberalism and the rights of the individual. So, seventy years on, what the heck’s going on with Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and how can we make sense of the text today?

As an update, I want to draw attention to some developments in relation to one of the initiatives that I have been shaping with colleagues at my new institution in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney, specifically Damien Cahill, Martijn Konings, and Stephen Castles, in relation to the launch of an international workshop later this year focusing on both Karl Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek. This is hopefully the first of a series of new initiatives in political economy at the University of Sydney with additional events including further forthcoming workshops, a major 2015 anniversary conference marking 40 years of the emergence of political economy at the University of Sydney, and new appointments. Those developments are all to come. For now, though, why hold a workshop on the work of both Karl Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek in 2014?